LESSONS IN LOGIC: The Conservative Ideal Incorporates Many Leftist Values

Now that I have offered a rather rough handling of Libertarianism, I want to address my ‘Conservative” friends. But first, I want to make sure my Conservative and Libertarian friends both understand something. I do not attack the Democrat Party directly because I consider that Party and everyone in it – leadership and membership alike – to be a lost cause. Democrats are hopelessly tied to the American Progressive agenda and, because of this, they are irrational. They cannot be reached with reason. This is not true about those calling themselves Libertarian and Conservative. The majority of you have not yet renounced the use of reason, but you are caught up in the grips of faction (as Madison defined it). In other words, you are fighting harder for your team than for your goal. My goal is not for a Party or even this nation. My goal is the preservation of individual rights and liberty. So, when I address Conservatives and Libertarians, it is in the hope that I can get you to stop worrying about your team (i.e. Party or even political label) and start worrying about the objective.

“Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”

–Benjamin Franklin

I am often criticized about worrying too much over the definition of words. Well, there’s a reason for my concern. Language is a form of logic, and if you do not know the words, you cannot reason properly and will open yourself to making mistakes in what you believe and why. This is why the Progressives always seem to be obsessed with matters of language: it’s because they know they can use it to form, shape and direct public opinion. It’s called propaganda, but it doesn’t work so well when the audience is properly educated. And that is why we should all be concerned with mastering the language. Unfortunately, mastering the language is only a part of the equation. We also need to know and understand history.

The term “Conservative has a definition, and I have explained it before:

But the definition of “Conservative” is not the subject of this post. The purpose of this post is to show that those who call themselves “Conservative” do not hold the same political ideology as the founding fathers because they have incorporated far too much of the Progressive philosophy into their own thinking. There are several points we could focus on, but for the sake of brevity, we will look at just two.

The first is the Conservative tendency to embrace the police State in the name of law and order. The Patriot Act is a perfect example of this. Our founders would have violently objected to the Patriot Act. It is completely unconstitutional, and yet, at the time the bill was being debated, Conservatives could be found defending the bill. They were even going so far as to question the patriotism of anyone who objected to the law. But look what has happened: those who objected have been vindicated, but now we are stuck not only with the Patriot Act, but also the TSA and DHS – and all in the name of law and order. This is not a founding ideal of this nation, but an authoritarian State is most certainly a main plank in the Progressive ideal.

Next, we have the Conservatives’ embrace of corporation. Franklin and Jefferson both wrote that those who object to the public control of property that exists only because of a public act should not partake in that sort of property. In short, if you do not want the government to be able to have some say over your business, do not incorporate it.

Now, I have not found where any of the founders expounded on this point past the words I have read from Jefferson and Franklin asserting a public right to control publically created entities (i.e. Corporations), but I suspect the reasoning is rooted in the founders’ understanding of Natural Law. You see, the corporation as we know it is – by its very nature – ‘collectivist.’ It is an artificial construction created by a legislative act of the entire people and, in theory, it is owned by many (i.e. stock holders). However, in practice, the corporation as it exists today is little more than a vehicle by which the responsibility for the operation of the corporation is shifted from those corporate officers in charge of running it to the corporation, itself. You see, we have given ‘personhood’ to something that is not real, and along with that ‘personhood,’ we have granted corporations rights as a person. This is why corporations are usually fined but no one goes to jail. And this is entirely at odds with Natural Law – but it is perfectly in line with the Progressive Ideal.

We could also go into the Conservative position on tariffs and free trade, on foreign military involvement and immigration. The positions of the majority of those who consider themselves to be part of the modern American Conservative movement are quite different in these areas than that of our founding fathers. Sadly, however, they are close to those of the Progressive movement, and this is because the Progressive movement got its start from within the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has co-opted those who consider themselves to be “Conservatives.” In truth, this is all a big word/ideals game designed to keep people fighting over Party and ideology rather than focusing on principle and common grounds for obtaining common goals based on those principles. And the people who have kept us chasing our tails for decades now depend on the Right being as ignorant as the rest of the population. It’s just that they have to be much more sophisticated in their approach where the Right is concerned. The few real thinkers on the Left already buy into the Progressive agenda, so there is little need to fool them, but the majority of those who think for themselves tend to reject the Progressive agenda because it leads to tyranny. So the people in control of our government and social institutions have to be trickier in directing the voters on the Right. But make no mistake about it; they still use the same basic techniques against us; they just do it in a much more sophisticated manner. All I am trying to do is help you see this by showing you that you do not believe what you think you believe in the hopes that this will get you to step back and look a little closer at the rest of what you think is real. If you do that, I think you might just find you have swallowed the founders’ red pill.